Watch a Surprisingly Touching Stream of Unwatched YouTube Videos

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Watch a Surprisingly Touching Stream of Unwatched YouTube Videos

James Thompson/Andrew Wong

Venture into space and you may experience a phenomenon called the overview effect. It comes with seeing Earth, a small, blue marble, against the vastness of space. Everything suddenly seems small, yet marvelous. Astronauts who've felt it have described an intense feeling of connectedness with humanity, and a profound euphoria similar to what you might experience in deep meditation.

Two creative technologists have created an oddly mesmerizing website that provides something approximating the overview effect, by drawing on the most mundane thing you might imagine: YouTube videos.

Astronaut.io shows an endless stream of random videos against a view of the planet from low Earth orbit. Scenes from a high school weight lifting competition might follow a birthday party in Texas that follows a man in Russia repairing his motorbike. You never know what to expect, yet the videos share something in common.

Andrew Wong and James Thompson created an algorithm that seeks videos fitting specific criteria: uploaded within the past week, with generic file names (IMG, MOV WMV) as titles, and zero views. The result is a fascinating glimpse at the mundane, perplexing, and oftentimes sweet events of everyday life.

James Thompson/Andrew Wong

Wong and Thompson started building Astronaut.io in 2011, pulling videos from Twitter. “It was a very very different experience,” Wong says. “Lots of ads and loud, flashing stuff. It was completely the opposite of what we were going for.” They soon realized the best way to find the “uneventful home video” aesthetic they wanted was to find videos that people cared so little about, they didn’t even bother to name them. “We did a search on Youtube for IMG or whatever and got thousands of results,” Thompson says. “It was amazing.”

One video seamlessly follows another with no buffering. Wong coded three players into the website, allowing two videos to buffer as the third played. This creates a smooth vignette effect where you glean just a bit of context about each clip. Videos last no more than 10 seconds and often change just as you begin to care (a button at the bottom of the page lets you linger on a video). That can be frustrating, but ephemerality was key. “For me there’s this metaphor of being on a train when you’re on a train you see things out the window and think, 'Oh what is that?' but it’s too late, it’s already gone by,” Wong says. “Not letting someone go too deep is pretty important.”

It's fair to assume the people who made these videos never meant for anyone beyond friends and family to see them. And most will never know that a stranger enjoyed a good laugh watching, say, their daughter's first dodgeball game. The tension between the uneasiness of this benign voyeurism and the sensation of feeling connected to a stranger is what makes Astronaut.io so wonderful. In a world where so many people live in bubbles of their own making, it's a lovely reminder that billions of people lead lives that are utterly foreign yet totally familiar.